Irish Women's Letters

The election of Mary Robinson as president of Ireland in 1990 marked the first time a woman had broken through the male hegemony that had dominated political Ireland since the beginning of modern republicanism in 1798. This collection by Flanagan (The Darling of My Heart) follows the words of the women who stood behind the revolutionaries, politicians and poets and who sometimes gave them a brisk shove forward. Starting with St. Brigid in the fifth century, Flanagan looks at Irish womanhood and how it helped shape the modern nation. We read Mary Ann McCracken's heartfelt letters to her love, Henry Joy McCracken, one of the founders of the United Irishmen in Belfast in 1791. We see how Oscar Wilde's mother, Lady Jane Francesca ""Speranza"" Wilde, and his wife, Constance Mary Wilde, handled his disgrace. Maud Gonne MacBride, wife of 1916 martyr Major John MacBride and the love of William Butler Yeats's life, writes to ""dear Willie"" about evictions of tenant farmers in 1899. And Nora Barnacle Joyce waxes poetic to her husband, James, in the Ulysses year of 1904, while Kitty Kiernan laments her ""little fits"" of the heart to her fiance, legendary revolutionary Michael Collins. A solid collection. (Nov.)